Following IBM's announcement this past week at InterOp, there has been a surge of interest in the recently proposed Open Datacenter Interoperable Network (ODIN) technical briefs. I'm pleased to report that Adva Optical Networking, a leading wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) company specializing in WAN transport, has endorsed the ODIN approach on their blog. There's never been a better opportunity for cloud data centers to get in on the ground floor by designing their next generation networks around the best practices and open industry standards referenced in ODIN. We appreciate Adva's support of this direction, and look forward to working with leading industry networking companies to implement the ODIN design recommendations in modern data center networks.

I’m pleased to report that BTI has become the latest company
to publicly endorse the Open Datacenter Interoperable Network (ODIN) approach
to designing data center networks. As regular readers of my blog know, IBM has released
a set of technical briefs describing ODIN, which provides an approach to using
open industry standards to create next generation data center networks.I’ve written, podcasted, and been interviewed
many times about ODIN, all of which is linked from my blog.This approach to using industry standards as
the preferred means to designing data center networks has been endorsed in this post from Chandra Pandey, Vice-President of Platform Solutions at BTI. Many thanks for this support of open
networking standards; I’m sure we’ll have more to say about how to create these
solutions with IBM and BTI technology in the near future.

The list of companies endorsing IBM's recently announced Open Datacenter with an Interoperable Network (ODIN) continues to grow. Ciena is the most recent company to endorse ODIN, as noted in their blog post from their CTO and Senior Vice-President, Products and Technology, Steve Alexander. In this post, Ciena says that ODIN "looks to be a nearly ideal approach to allow the connect, compute, and store resources to be virtualized and operationally united for simplicity and scale". In fact, the use of industry standards to enable more tightly integrated solutions has been recently demonstrated in IBM's PureSystems offerings, which were announced on April 11; you can read more about PureSystems in my earlier blog posts. I'm very pleased that Ciena has endorsed the ODIN approach, and I'm sure we'll see more examples of this design approach in the coming months. Remember, let me know what you think about ODIN by commenting on this blog, or on my Twitter feed, and keep watching this site for the latest data center networking news.

This past month, a lot of people have been asking me to comment on the rumors swirling around a possible IBM open source initiative for software-defined networking (SDN) called Daylight. And I mean a LOT of people, from the audience at the OFC/NFOEC conference, to the Wall Street banks who attended my talk at the Open Network Exchange in Manhattan, to my fellow networking engineers who participated in the online roundtable from the MPLS/Ethernet World Congress. Since I usually enjoy a good technical discussion, it’s been more than a bit frustrating that I couldn’t respond to these rumors directly before now. Waiting for the official announcement of this initiative was made even harder when I read some of the preliminary online speculation about Daylight that was either misinformed, misguided, or just plain wrong.

In any case, it was a tremendous relief for me when The Linux Foundation (the industry’s leading nonprofit organization dedicated to open source development) announced OpenDaylight this morning. So for everyone who’s been waiting along with me, let’s take this opportunity to clear the air about what OpenDaylight actually means for the data networking industry.

As I mentioned in my recent tutorial at OFC/NFOEC, major industry trends such as warehouse scale data centers, big data analytics, and cloud computing in the enterprise are driving companies to revisit their data center network designs. SDN has the potential to lower capital and operating expenses, increase efficiencies, and provide faster time to value in this rapidly changing environment. But in order to fully realize the potential value of SDN, as quickly as possible, we need to go beyond the product line of any one networking company. We need to create a development community that encourages rapid innovation from a broad range of stake holders serving a common goal. In short, we need to do for networking what Linux did for server operating systems.

OpenDaylight is an open source framework intended to accelerate adoption of Software Defined Networking and to create an open, transparent approach to SDN development. Just as the Linux community created a viable open source operating system, which matured until it was deployed on enterprise-class systems and mainframes, OpenDaylight will create programmable SDN abstractions for many different types of data networks. Much of the initial code will be contributed and supported by industry leading companies who have signed up as either Platinum or Gold members of the OpenDaylight project. I feel this is one of the strongest features of the project; OpenDaylight is not owned by any one company, although many industry leaders have committed both developers and funding to the effort. Besides IBM, founding members include BigSwitch Networks, Brocade, Cisco, Citrix, Ericsson, Juniper, Microsoft, NEC, Red Hat, and VMWare; other contributors include Arista, Fujitsu, Alcatel-Lucent, Intel, Dell, Hewlett Packard, Nuage, and Plumgrid. I’ve been working with many other IBMers for the past few months, talking with these companies and crafting a common perspective for the SDN open source community. You’ll note that a number of these companies had previously publicly endorsed IBM’s point of view regarding open networking standards (the Open Datacenter Interoperable Network, or ODIN). One of the five initial ODIN volumes deals with SDN and its implications for the data center; by definition, supporting OpenDaylight means supporting open networking standards, so it’s nice to see other companies joining this commitment to interoperable SDN networks.

This project is good news for anyone who’s been trying to implement the recent Gartner Group study, which effectively said that corporations who didn’t pursue a multi-vendor networking strategy were paying 15-25% more than necessary for their network, and thus failing to meet their fiduciary responsibilities. But SDN is about much more than just reducing your network operating expenses; it’s also a driving force for new applications and potentially new revenue streams. As I’ve said in my blog on many occasions, open standards and open source software are an excellent way to foster innovation. By supporting OpenFlow and other standards, OpenDaylight allows a global development community to innovate at the speed of software, just as we’ve seen for smart phones or tablet computers.

The first code from the OpenDaylight Project is expected to be available in 3Q this year, and will include an open controller, virtual overlay network, protocol plug-ins, and switch device enhancements. The code is independent of the network operating system, and is governed by best practices such as the Eclipse Public License (EPL) commonly used for Java. Just as in any open source community, companies are free to participate based on the merit of their contributions. For example, IBM plans to contribute an open source version of its Distributed Overlay Virtual Ethernet (DOVE) technology, which has been working its way through the IETF standards bodies for some time now. DOVE software runs on top of the existing network hardware infrastructure and virtualizes layer 2 and 3 network properties. This makes it possible to set up, manage, and scale virtual networks much faster than ever before. Some possible applications of DOVE include merging multiple data networks together (for example, when one company acquires another) or allowing highly virtualized servers to connect with merchant silicon switches (by abstracting the IP and MAC address tables).

I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating…it's a very cool time to be a networking engineer. I’m excited by the potential of OpenDaylight for cloud computing and other applications, and I’m looking forward to working with the global development community on bringing all the benefits of Linux and server virtualization to the data center network.

Still not sure how you feel about open source networking? Now that I can talk freely about OpenDaylight, drop me a line on Twitter @Dr_Casimer

As noted in a recent post on this blog, Huawei had included a mention of the Open Datacenter Interoperable Network (ODIN) in their InterOp Webinar on open standards for cloud networking. In addition, Huawei has now posted a more detailed endorsement of ODIN on their blog site. According to this site, " ODIN addresses best practices and interpretations of networking standards that are vital to efficient data center operation". For those of you who haven't reviewed the ODIN materials yet, they include a description of the transformation taking place in modern data center networks and how to best address these issues using open industry standards. Keep watching this space for more news on ODIN and other data center networking issues.

I’m pleased to report that Juniper Networks has publicly endorsed the open data center interoperable network (ODIN) approach to designing data center networks. If you've been following this blog, then you know that on May 8, IBM released a set of technical briefs describing ODIN during the InterOp conference in Las Vegas. This approach to using industry standards as the preferred means to designing data center networks has been supported by Juniper, as discussed in this blog post from Liz King, Vice-President of Global Alliances. Many thanks to Juniper for their support of open networking standards; I’m sure we’ll have more to say about how these solutions should be designed in the near future.

In addition to the many industry leading companies who have endorsed IBM's recently released technical briefs, describing an Open Datacenter with an Interoperable Network (ODIN), the first academic endorsement of ODIN has recently come from Marist College (Go Red Foxes !). In their endorsement, Marist notes that their support of ODIN was part of their broader efforts to insure that the next generation of technology students are prepared for the challenges which await them. Marist also cited their related work with the National Science Foundation funded lab for enterprise computing, their network interoperability lab, and their cloud computing computational resources. Also commenting on ODIN as part of their Twitter feed were IBM Vice President Ross Mauri (a member of the Marist Board of Directors) and Marist Vice President and Chief Information Officer Bill Thirsk. I'm sure there will be opportunities for IBM and other ODIN supporters to work with colleges such as Marist on research and interoperability that will benefit the open design principles set forth in the ODIN documents.

As the year draws to a close, I predict there will be no shortage of article looking back at 2012 and ahead to 2013. And my humble blog is no exception.

Looking back on 2012, I’ve kept you up to date on the latest networking developments from IBM and the industry. I’ve also recently been blogging about the upcoming OFC/NFOEC conference in March 2013 (where I’m giving a tutorial presentation) on topics including software-defined networking (SDN), energy efficient networking, cloud computing, wavelength multiplexing, 100G networks, and more. And don't miss my latest webinar with Forrester Group on SDN and how it can make a big impact on your plans for next year.

Assuming the ancient Mayans were wrong and the world doesn’t end in 2012, here’s my top 3 predictions to keep in mind for the coming year, counting down in reverse order:

(3) Open standards will be the best way forward for data networking. This past year, the response to IBM’s Open Datacenter Interoperable Network (ODIN) was huge – over 20,000 views in first 2 weeks alone. Look for more industry standards and open source software to make an impact in 2013, including ODIN on steroids and lots more from academic partners like the Marist College SDN/OpenFlow lab.

(2) Data rates will continue to increase. OK, that was an easy one, but it’s happening faster than most people thought…10G links are ubiquitous, 40G links are going mainstream in 2013, and 100G for the data center is right around the corner in 2014.

(1) Network virtualization will be the next big thing. Software-defined networking (SDN) is being deployed by some large users (just ask Google), the OpenFlow 1.3 standard has been released, and overlay networks like DOVE are moving forward in the standards bodies

Looking ahead into the new year, I’ll be bringing you more tweets and blogs on the latest data center networking news, as well as new podcasts and webinars. Maybe I’ll see you at OFC 2013 for my tutorial, and watch for the next edition of my book in 2013. Or, you can catch me at any of the remaining Hudson Valley FIRST Lego League tournaments in January and February; we’ll be sending the Hudson Valley Champion to World Fest this year, and that team will be selected from a field of over 80 teams through six qualifying events held across New York’s Hudson Valley, including Troy, Ballston Spa, Poughkeepsie, LaGrange, Elmsford, and Sleepy Hollow tournaments. And, as always, you can keep the conversation going by commenting on my blog or Twitter. I’d like to wish all my readers a safe, happy, healthy holiday season and a prosperous new year.

During the 2012 InterOp conference in Las Vegas, IBM introduced a set of technical briefs describing the path towards creating an Open Datacenter with an Interoperable Network (ODIN). The approach of using open industry standards in the data center network was recently endorsed by NEC Corporation on their corporate blog. In particular, NEC mentions IBM's work with the Open Network Foundation (ONF) and their efforts to create software-defined networking standards (including both OpenFlow and network overlays) for next generation data center networks. I'm very pleased by NEC's support for software-defined networking and other open standards in the data center network, stay tuned to this blog or my Twitter feed to hear more about this and related topics.

I’m pleased to report that Alcatel-Lucent has publicly endorsed the Open Data Center Interoperable Network (ODIN) approach to designing data center networks. As regular readers of my blog know, IBM released a set of technical briefs describing ODIN during the InterOp conference in Las Vegas earlier this year. This approach to using industry standards as the preferred means to designing data center networks has been endorsed in this post from Sam Bucci, a Vice-President at Alcatel-Lucent. Many thanks for this support of open networking standards; I’m sure we’ll have more to say about how to build these solutions with Alcatel-Lucent in the near future.

During InterOp 2012 in Las Vegas, IBM released a set of five technical briefs which lay out the path towards creating an Open Datacenter with an Interoperable Network (ODIN). This approach uses industry standards as the preferred means to address key issues in next generation data center networking. The response has been tremendous, and ODIN has been very well received across the industry. I've been posting a lot about this in my blog lately, but for your convenience here's the current list of everyone who's endorsed ODIN so far, in no particular order:

Juniper Networks noted in an endorsement from their Vice President of Global Alliances that there is an unprecedented array of technical challenges which ODIN will address, including cost effective scaling, highly virtualized data centers, and reliable delivery of data frames.

Brocade said that “using an approach like ODIN…facilitates the deployment of new technologies”

Huawei said that “ODIN addresses best practices and interpretations of networking standards that are vital to efficient data center operation.” Also, Huawei Fellow Peter Ashwood-Smith shows an ODIN view of the future data center network in his webinar for Interop, entitled “How to prepare your infrastructure for the cloud using open standards.”

Extreme Networks said in their endorsement that “Having open, interoperable, and standard-based technologies can enhance (these) cost savings by allowing choice of best-of-breed technologies.”

NEC noted that software-defined networking (SDN) is part of ODIN, and has emerged as the preferred approach to solving Big Data and network bottleneck issues.

BigSwitch said in their blog “The Importance of Being Open” that “ODIN is a great example of how we need to maintain openness and interoperability in next generation networks”

Adva Optical Networking in their blog on "the missing piece in the cloud computing puzzle" talked about the role of ODIN in the wide area network, including both dark fiber solutions, MPLS/GPLS, and emerging trends using SDN to manage cloud computing and the WAN. They also cited recent SDN work with the Ofelia project in Europe as an example of ongoing work towards open standards in the WAN.

Ciena pointed out in a post from their CTO and Senior Vice-President that “the use of open standards has been one of the fundamental “change agents” in the networking industry”. These standards are “associated with encouraging creativity by enabling a diverse and rapidly expanding user group” and “generally support the most cost-effective scaling”. They called ODIN “a nearly ideal approach” and said that ODIN “is on its way to becoming industry best-practice for transforming data-centers”.

Marist College provided a university’s perspective, as their CIO noted that their support of ODIN was part of their broader efforts to insure that the next generation of technology students are prepared for the challenges which await them. Marist also cited related work with their National Science Foundation funded lab for enterprise computing and their cloud computing computational resources.

Thanks to everyone for showing your support of open industry standards and the ODIN approach to data center networking. I’m honored and humbled by this strong show of support from so many industry leaders, and I’m very excited to be taking the first steps with all of you on this journey towards a more open, interoperable data center network. As we continue to develop more content for ODIN, both around new standards as well as deeper technical descriptions of reference architectures which implement the ODIN design principles, I’ll keep you posted on further activities with these and other companies.

Would you like to be next to endorse ODIN, and receive eternal fame and glory by being mentioned in my blog ? Let me know where I can point to your endorsement, or drop me a line on my Twitter feed

For those of you who don’t know what SDN and OpenFlow mean, beyond being some of the hottest buzzwords in the networking industry right now, you can check out the appropriate volume of the Open Datacenter Interoperable Network (ODIN) reference architecture for a detailed introduction to this topic and the problems it addresses. For those who just need a quick refresher, software-defined networking is an approach which allows the basic data flows through a switch to be manipulated through an external controller. It’s an industry standard approach being led by the Open Network Foundation (ONF), a consortium run by the world’s largest network users (Google, Facebook, Verizon, and more). OpenFlow is a relatively new industry standard which separates the data plane and control plane of a switch, creating flow table abstractions (in other words, you can match data flows based on content of the packets and perform actions associated with each flow match; if you don’t assign a flow, traffic can be blocked or filtered using this technique). Optimal paths through the network are defined by the OpenFlow controller, rather than some proprietary software within the switch.

One of the potential benefits of OpenFlow is that it allows you to innovate at Internet speeds, by just changing the software and not replacing or reconfiguring the switch hardware. There are still open questions about just how large an OpenFlow controller can scale, how many controllers we need, etc. Marist College has created an SDN lab which will contribute to the OpenFlow community, support research around SDN, and possibly support compliance testing in the near future. They are engaged with some large OpenFlow switch providers (including IBM) and some interested OpenFlow adopters (to be named later) to investigate use cases and performance limitations of the current OpenFlow protocol. Their current lab environment includes four IBM G8264 OpenFlow enabled 10/40G switches in a spine-leaf configuration, running under an open source FloodLight controller. These switches interconnect a server farm based on IBM x86, Power, and System Z enterprise servers. Many of the x86 servers run the VMWare hypervisor and the IBM 5000v virtual switch. The servers are connected via a separate Fibre Channel SAN to various enterprise storage devices.

One of Marist’s early contributions has been to create an open source FloodLight administrative control panel (FACP) that can be used for network administration. The FACP eliminates the need to write Python script to control the switches, thereby reducing management complexity. FACP provides an abstraction of the network, and a configuration application can be build against this abstraction. At the conference, Marist held a demo showing how this controller can provision quality of service and routing of Layer 2 & 3 VLANs in the network. Manipulation of firewall ACLs is also possible, and future extensions may include MPLS and other WAN related protocols. Ongoing work in this area is focused on creating a static flow pusher, which will allow a static programmable interface to write scripts which support flow tables across the network using the FloodLight rest API.

Further investigation will include such topics as demonstrating multi-vendor interoperability under a common FloodLight controller, and exploring the limits of scalability and security associated with OpenFlow networking. Keep up with their latest work and see their presentation from the NSF conference .

Want to suggest another TLA (three letter acronym) for my list ? Comment on this blog entry below, or drop me a line on my Twitter feed.

Last week, I presented some of my work at the annual North America Technology Symposium sponsored by Adva Optical Networks, at the Millenium Broadway Hotel in New York City. Regular readers of my blog will recall that Adva is among the many companies who have publicly endorsed the Open Datacenter Interoperable Network (ODIN), which is IBM’s vision for next generation data networking. While the Adva symposium was admittedly focused mostly on their solutions, there were many interesting presentations of general interest. The presentations are available here, but Id like to review the highlights in this blog.

The symposium was a full day event, opening at 9 AM with a welcome from Adva’s CEO, Brian Protiva, followed by a series of invited speakers. After lunch, two breakout sessions were offered for either enterprise or carrier networking (I chose the enterprise track, which focused on 100G metro and 16G Fibre Channel SAN). The day wound up with a Q&A session and dinner.

First, one of the Vice-Presidents from Verizon discussed adoption of software defined networking to create what he called “service aware networks”. He cited several examples of how carriers and ISPs can leverage SDN to grow top line revenue and provide value added services. We heard many interesting factoids during the day, such as how Internet content consumptions, driven by video, will grow 10X by 2017. It was clear that commoditized hardware and centralized software control were creating an interesting value proposition in this market.

Later, my presentation dealt with using SDN to help manage the combination of exponential capacity growth and declining margins faced by many ISPs and cloud providers. In the past, networking was all about how quickly you could deploy, scale, and manage infrastructure to create value. Networking equipment was relatively feature-poor; a combination of low bandwidth, customer ASICs with low functionality and immature protocols in the data and control planes made it difficult to realize a higher value proposer. That’s all changing; modern Ethernet bandwidth is approaching that of a computer back plane, flatter 2 tier Clos or mesh topologies offer better performance, and protocols like TRILL and OpenFlow coax more value from merchant silicon. In this age of network affluence, users demand a higher quality of service, including bandwidth and latency guarantees, turnkey provisioning, and application aware network optimization. This leads to a new value proposition form SDN networks; virtualization of the data center network and beyond is the next big frontier. This value doesn’t’ come with out challenges though. Current OpenFlow is driving us back to a centralized management framework, and scaling is an issue. The benefits of a flow switched topology are clear, however, and include standardized, fine grain flow control, rapid application deployment, and end-to-end performance guarantees – real value that clients are willing to pay for.

From Michael Haley, IBM Distinguished Engineer, we learned more about how cloud computing is changing the world. Market dynamics are volatile; look t the world’s 10 largest companies from the year 2000,k and you’ll only recognize 2 of the same names on the list today. But the market potential is also growing; there will be over a trillion devices connected to the Internet next year. And smart enterprise CEOs are leveraging hybrid cloud in 60% of their installations (up from 33% just tow years ago). Cloud adoption is driven by workloads, and some analysts believe that a major section will be compute as a service, representing over 20% of a projected $55B market in 2014. Business analytics, social business, telecommunications, banking, mobile video, healthcare, and utilities dominate in different markets worldwide. In China, for example, strategic investments in “cloud cities” have been launched to support a major part of their current $4 Trillion, 5 year economic plan.

Supporting an earlier assertion about bandwidth growth, the enterprise breakout sessions included a live demonstration of 100G metro Ethernet and a discussion of the power, space, and cost for such solutions. Using a network test set and traffic source, Adva showed how they can transport 100G over metro distances with appliances about 1 U high that fir into a standard 19 inch equipment rack. Various cable configurations and latency measurements were also made during this presentation.

I’m sure by now you’ve got the general idea…Bandwidth is exploding in the metro area at lower cost than ever before, driven by new applications such as cloud computing and the promise of software-defined networking. Put on your shades, the future for metro optics looks bright indeed.

Are you looking forward to high bandwidth optical links in the metro cloud, or are you just blinded by the light? Drop me aline or send me a tweet @Dr_Casimer if you’d like to discuss more.

While I’ve been trying to enjoy the nice summer weather as much as anyone (even with teenagers, Disney World is simply awesome) the wheels of technology continue to push forward even during summer vacation. For example, IBM recently hosted the System X and PureSystems Technical University in San Francisco, California. With over 27 major sponsors and exhibitors ranging from Intel to QLogic, this was an event worth attending. As usual, my interest lies in all things related to data center networking, so I was pleased to see more content on IBM’s Storage Volume Controller (SVC) presented by one of our business partners, Brocade (although IBM invented SVC some time ago, Brocade was only recently qualified to support stretch clusters as part of this solution). Regular readers of my blog will recall that Brocade is among the endorsers for the Open Datacenter Interoperable Network (ODIN), and that the SVC Stretch Cluster solution was discussed previously when I presented at the IBM Storage Edge conference in June. I’d like to mention a few additional features of storage networking using SVC that didn’t make it into my earlier blog, and try to segue from Disney World to World Wide Port Names (let me know how you think this works out).

If you missed this event and would like to follow along, the presentation from Brocade can be accessed at the IBM Tech University site; once you’ve created a login, just search for presentation evr51. You can also catch up on this solution through the IBM storage roads show making its way around the country for the next month or so.

Multi-site storage deployments are useful for many applications. These include improved physical security, disaster avoidance/recovery, and increased uptime by moving workloads to different compute centers. The IBM SVC Stretch Cluster solution aligns your storage access needs with virtual machine mobility across extended distances. The actual distance depends on your latency requirements; since we can’t get around the speed of light limitations (yet), for typical applications IBM recommends 100 to 150 km or so, although the solution is qualified up to 300 km or more. SVC Stretch Clusters provides read/write access to storage volumes across multiple sites, and works in concert with Tivoli management products to insure synchronous data replication. Also, SVC supports SAN routing with industry standard FC-IP links for intercluster communications and volume mirroring within split cluster groups. The underlying IP infrastructure complies with ODIN best practices, and includes Brocade offerings such as the MLXe switch to provide line rate 1, 10, and 100 Gbit/s Layer 2 connectivity based on MPLS and VPLS/VLL.

Digging down into the technology a bit further, Brocade supports the IBM 16 Gbit/s Fibre Channel adapters used in System X solutions; both single and dual port options are available, running over 1,000,000 IOPS per adapter. These adapters support features including SAO (application quality of service assignment), target rate limiting, boot over SAN, boot LUN discovery, NPIV, and switched N_ports. The IBM Flex systems include embedded offerings such as a 24 port or 48 port scalable SAN switch, also running 16 Gbit/s links with over 500,000 IOPS per port. The SAN switches used in SVC provide additional buffer credits to support long distance connectivity (half a dozen ports running up to 250 km without performance droop, with negligible droop up to 300 km or longer). To reduce the number of fibers required between sites and save cost when connecting two remote locations, you can consolidate up to four lower data rate links into a single inter-switch link at 16 Gbit/s, and then logically combine up to eight ISLs into a single high performance frame-based trunk.

When using the Brocade Fibre Channel adapters in a fabric, it’s possible to eliminate fabric reconfiguration when adding or replacing servers. You can also reduce the need to modify zones and LUN masking, since you can pre-provision fabric ports with virtual worldwide port names ((WWPNs) and boot your LUN zones, fabric zones, and LUN masks. It’s easy to migrate virtual WWPNs within a switch, and map them to physical devices to help with asset management. Further, you can use diagnostic port features to non-intrusively verify that your ports, transceivers, and cables are in good working order, reducing the fabric deployment and diagnostic times from days to a few hours or less (depending on the size of your fabric).

If you’d prefer to connect multiple sites using wavelength multiplexing (such as the offerings from ODIN endorsers Adva, Ciena, or Huawei) you can run ISLs directly over a WDM network. I’ll have more to say about WDM solutions qualified by IBM in a future blog. For now, here’s a quick tip for configuring your Brocade switch fabric: if you want to run line rate 10 Gbit/s from the Brocade SAN switch directly over WDM, the first 8 ports on the FC16-32 or FC16-48 switches can be configured to operate at this data rate – you can save a slot in the DCX with this configuration. And remember that you can always logically partition the switches to isolate different traffic types, so you can connect storage resources in a PureFlex with a larger existing SAN that might be running your System Z FICON traffic, and keep the two applications isolated from each other.

Your SVC Stretch Cluster solution compliments the integrated compute power of PureFlex, and both of them can co-exist in your data center. All the PureFlex resources are managed from one point with Flex System Manager (FSM), and the use of open industry standard protocols mean that you’ll be getting the lowest possible hardware cost. Of course, you knew all that if you made it to PureSystems Technical University for your summer vacation, so you can get started saving money and improving storage performance right away. If you missed it, don’t worry…IBM will be offering more technical university events in the coming months, spread around the world, for not only PureSystems but many other brands as well. If you can attend, drop me a line & let me know how you liked it; I’ll keep everyone posted on the feedback through my blog & Twitter feed.

If you haven’t guessed from the blatant pop culture reference in the title of my blog , I spent the first week of June at the IBM Edge storage conference (and I promise if you keep reading that I’ll refrain from making any puns on the Edge theme – despite the temptation to bring up a favorite Irish rock band hero ). Anyway, it would hardly be appropriate to mention another band when Foreigner did such an awesome job rockin’ the conference. Who knew when I was growing up that the 80’s would produce the greatest rock ballads of all time ?

Anyway, it’s been a great week at IBM Edge, hearing about all the latest advances in storage technology; in case you missed the talk on SVC Stretch Clusters as an example of the ODIN reference architecture, let me say a few words about it here. This will get a bit technical, but don’t worry…we’re not going to have a quiz at the end.

The problem we’re trying to solve is VM mobility over extended distance, and multi-site workload deployment across data centers. VM mobility not only improves availability of your applications, it’s a more efficient way to use limited storage resources. The most common reason for using this approach typically involves some form of business continuity or disaster avoidance/recovery solution, including such planned events as migrating one data center to another or eliminating downtime due to scheduled maintenance. But given an increasingly global work force, there are other good reasons to explore VM mobility. Many clients are realizing that this approach provides load balancing and enhanced user performance across multiple time zones (the so-called “follow the sun” approach). Others are realizing that by moving workloads over distance, it’s possible to optimize the cost of power to run the data center; since the lowest cost electricity is available at night, this strategy is known as “follow the moon”.

IBM has announced a software bundle featuring Storage Volume Controller (SVC), which includes Stretch Clustering over long distance. This provides read/write access to storage volumes located far apart from each other, enabling data replication across multiple data centers. SVC works in concert with Tivoli Productivity Center (TPC) to manage your storage, and integration with VMWare’s products like VMotion and vCenter enables transparent migration of virtual machines and their corresponding data or applications.

Let’s consider two data centers separated by up to 300 km (supported in SVC 6.3), and interconnected by a traditional IP network such as the internet or by dark optical fiber. We require many of the features for an Open Datacenter with an Interoperable Network (ODIN) for this solution, including lossless Ethernet fabrics, automated port profile migration, Layer 2 VLANS in each location, and an intersite Layer 2 VLAN supporting MPLS/VPLS (preferably with a 10G or 100G Ethernet line speed between sites, since the SAN infrastructure is likely running either 8G or 16G Fibre Channel). An SVC split cluster uses industry standard Fibre Channel links for both node-to-node communication and for host access to SVC nodes, so your production sites must be connected by Fibre Channel links or FC-IP.

Generally a business continuity solution will define one physical location as a failure domain, though this can vary depending on what you’re trying to protect against; a failure domain could also consist of a group of floors in a single building, or just different power domains in the same data center. In order for SVC to decide which storage nodes survive if we lose a failure domain, the solution uses a quorum disk (a management disk that contains a reserved area used exclusively for system management). At a minimum, you should have one active quorum disk on a separate power grid in one of your failure domains; up to three quorum disks can be configured with SVC, though only one is active at any given time. Metro mirroring is recommended for this type of solution; a maximum round trip delay of 80 ms is supported (note that routing is required, since the fabrics at each location are not merged).

Connectivity between sites may take several forms. First, if the regular Internet provides sufficient quality of service (QoS) and meets your business objectives for recovery time, recovery point, etc., the IBM SVC uses industry standard protocols (FC-IP) in conjunction with a Brocade switch infrastructure to transport storage over distance. This is typically a low cost option, though you might require multiple circuits with load balancing (a so-called virtual trunk). Second, it’s possible to run a Brocade inter-switch link (ISL) between SVC nodes (with SVC 6.3.0 or higher). Brocade switches provide ISL options including consolidation of up to four ISLs at 4 Gbit/s each (creating a 16G trunk), or up to eight ISLs at 16 Gbit/s each (creating a 128G trunk). Buffer credit support for up to 250 km (nearly the SVC limit) is available. SVC supports SAN routing (including FC-IP links) for intercluster storage connections. Finally, note that you can connect multiple locations with optical fiber and use a variety of protocol-agnostic wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) products in this solution. This may provide better QoS or dedicated bandwidth for large applications. A 10G passive WDM option is available on some Brocade switches (with options such as in-flight compression and encryption), or a stand-alone WDM product can be employed (IBM has qualified many such solutions, including those from ODIN participants Adva, Ciena, and Huawei). Your local service provider may also offer a variety of managed service backup options using a combination of these features. Attachment of each SVC node to both local and remote SAN switches (without ISLs) is typically done in this case. Both the ISL and non-ISL approaches are known as split I/O groups.

IBM SVC storage manager works in concert with vCenter through API plug-ins. This includes VADP (which provides data protection for snapshot backups at the VMware-level rather than the LUN level, allowing you to concentrate on the value of the VM rather than the physical location of the associated data). Performance improvements can be achieved by offloading some functions to the storage hypervisor, as well. The storage hypervisor includes a virtualization platform, controller, and management (TPC supports application aware snapshots of your data through Flash Copy Manager). At the management level, IBM also allows the storage hypervisor components to be managed as plug-ins for vCenter. VM location can be managed through vCenter with Global Server Load Balancer (GSLB), which works in concert with a Brocade API plug-in. Further, vCenter is integrated with Brocade Application Resource Broker (ARB), which can report VM status back to a Brocade ADX switch. vCenter and GSLB manage both VM and IP profiles, performing intelligent load balancing to redirect traffic to the VM’s new location.

With this combination of ODIN best practices, IBM SVC, and Brocade SAN/FC-IP connectivity, your data can rest easy, wherever it happens to be (and so can you).

There’s been so much going on in the world of data networking lately that I hardly know where to begin. It feels like I’ve been living on Internet Time this year (maybe you have, too); it’s hard to believe it’s already most of the way through first quarter. So, while I usually don’t take this approach, I thought that the fastest way to get everyone up to date on all the latest networking news would be to let you pick your favorites from the list of my recent presentations, podcasts, and webinars.

For starters, I recently got back from the Open Network Exchange meeting in New York City, sponsored by Network World magazine in mid-February. I gave a talk on how software-defined networking is being used as part of the ODIN network architecture, including some thoughts on finding a standard definition for SDN (something even Bob Metcalf hasn’t been able to do).
I also spoke about how SDN disrupts existing markets, reviewed IBM’s early client adopters & the benefits they have realized, and offered a few thoughts on what the future holds. You can see my presentation, plus others from the conference, at this site:

Of course, there’s still a lot of debate among different parts of the industry regarding what SDN really means. In particular, the datacom and telecom worlds have surprisingly different perspectives on this issue. I recently participated in a roundtable discussion on this topic, along with representatives from Cisco, Juniper, Huawei, Alcatel-Lucent, MRV, AT&T, Verizon, Orange, Ericsson, Rad Data Communications, and the ONF; you can listen to the discussion here In the future we plan more of these round table discussions, leading up to the 2013 MPLS/Ethernet World Congress, so keep watching as the debate continues.

I still feel that network virtualization is the next big
thing in our industry, and software-defined networking has become one of the
hottest topics since the creation of Ethernet 25 years ago (if your memory doesn’t
go back that far, read the first chapter in your CCNA qualification guidebook
to see how the world used to be made up of private networks from IBM, DEC,
Xerox, and others).While SDN is almost
certainly over-hyped right now, I believe it’s nearing the peak of the Gartner
Group hype cycle, as evidenced by some early adopters who have found high value
use cases for this technology.To hear
more, listen to my podcast with Lippis Group on SDN enablement of next generation
data centers, recorded December 2012

While you’re on the Lippis Group website, if you still haven’t read my blog or the IBM System Networking website articles about the Open Datacenter Interoperable Network (ODIN), download my podcast on this topic to get up to date on how ODIN is being applied at large data centers worldwide, and how it will continue to reflect changes in the networking community throughout this coming year.

If you’re a regular reader of my blog and Twitter feed, then
you know that I’m passionate about open standards.In fact, if somebody tries to tell you they
have SDN working in their data center today, but it only runs on their
equipment, don’t believe them…SDN only works when it’s part of a larger,
standards-based data center strategy.If
you’d like to read about that larger strategy, and how it relates to big data,
analytics, and other workloads, there’s a nice, short introduction in the new
IBM RedPaper Point of View (PoV) article series.Sponsored in part by the IBM Academy of
Technology, these new Redpapers bring you all the key facts for a quick
tutorial on a subject, and refer you to the much longer Redbooks for a
step-by-step cookbook on how to make them work for you.Redpapers are available on a wide range of
topics; for data networking, start with my PoV on data networking IBM Redbooks PoV publication, #redp-4933-00 ,

Interested in storage area networking, or wondering how the SAN is going to change in the future? I've been working on that question with some of our industry partners, including ODIN-endorser and leading SAN authority Brocade, who have also recently been qualified by IBM for extended distance backup solutions using SAN Volume Controller (SVC). To see how SVC handles long distance Fibre Channel applications and integrates with VMWare management solutions, check out our recent presentation from IBM SHARE (session 12735) on avoiding the fog and smog that can come with cloud networks.

Late last year, the governor of New York State announced the creation of a new, $3M Center for Cloud Computing and Analytics, based at Marist College. IBM has funded an SDN research lab which is affiliated with this group, and which will also be taking advantage of Marist’s membership in the Internet 2 consortium (regular blog readers will also recall that Marist is the first academic institution to endorse ODIN). While this program is still in its early days, Marist has successfully built an SDN testbed using the Floodlight controller, made contributions to the Floodlight distro, released an open source SDN dashboard tool called Avior, and begun to prototype SDN in a mainframe enterprise environment. The college recently presented a 90 minute, sold-out presentation on their SDN work at the TIP 2013 conference in Hawaii; if you didn’t get a trip to this tropical paradise to hear them, you can still find their presentation and summaries of their recent work.

Did I hear someone ask how Google is using optical
technologies to add value in their data center networks?(yes, I have the technology to hear you
through my blog page, but if I told you how it works I’d have to kill
you).Anyway, some of my colleagues at
Google recently weighed in on this topic for Laser Focus World, and I was
subsequently invited to present a
webinar based on their work (with a few of my own recent accomplishments thrown
in).You might not agree with everything
they have to say (after all, very few of us are running a data center with
Google’s requirements), but it’s always interesting to hear one of the biggest
network operators on the planet talking about optical technology.You can listen to an on-demand playback of my webinar, which cites the original Google article.

Finally, you may have noticed that one of the largest conferences in the field, the Optical Fiber Conference & National Fiber Optic Engineers Conference (OFC/NFOEC) has invited me to blog about some of the hot topics in the industry leading up to the March 2013 OFC meeting. I’ve been doing this for a few months now, on a wide range of topics including low power optical interconnects, optics for cloud computing and SDN, WAN interconnects, and next generation data centers.

Also, I’ll be doing a live daily blog from OFC starting
March 17, so be sure to check this site for regular updates during the
conference. Or you can stop by &
visit me in person, either during my presentation for the OIDA workshop on
metrics for aggregated networks or my tutorial on optical interconnects for datacom on Tuesday, March 19.I’ll also be stopping by the Elsevier booth
on the trade show floor to check on plans for the fourth edition of my book, the
Handbook of Fiber Optic Data Communication, coming out later this year (but
that’s another blog….)

As I’ve said before, this is a very interesting time to be an optical network engineer. I hope that some of these recent articles appeal to you, and if there’s another topic you’d like to see me cover, drop me a line or send me a tweet (@Dr_Casimer). And if anybody would like to get together at OFC/NFOEC in Anaheim, be sure to let me know!